Cydia

Research company DisplaySearch has crunched the numbers from last quarter's mobile PC sales and Apple retook the top spot with the largest slice of the market.

Apple shipped roughly 13.6 million units which accounted for 21 percent of the mobile PC market. Apple supplanted HP as the top mobile PC maker, no doubt due to HP's inability to sell its WebOS tablets, which they announced is shut down. So much for that Palm acquisition.

While HP only managed to ship 9.7 million units (15 percent market share), most of those weren't tablets. If the study didn't count tablets as mobile PC's, Apple would lose nearly 80 percent of their tallied mobile PC sales. Still, the amazing growth of the tablet sector has helped take the place of slumping PC and laptop sales, which are down for the second straight quarter.

Apple should grab somewhere around 60 percent of the tablet market share by the end of this year, and largely because of their success, tablets have officially started chipping away at traditional laptop sales.

So slice off the iPad tablet (which even this article separates from PCs and laptops) and Apple got spanked in actual PC/laptop sales. Factoring in the iPad as a PC, which is highly debatable, is the only reason Apple has accomplished this.

Even without being tethered to a computer anymore, I still don't see a tablet as a mobile computer. They're honestly just big PDAs. I can't hook a USB thumb drive or external drive up to one and copy files over. I can't use my LCD/LED televisions as a monitor. I can't run a dual monitor output on it. Can't hook it up to all my computer recording gear. Can't add/upgrade memory or hard drive space. Can't hook it up to my pc 5.1 surround gear.
They're neat, but only about as useful as a netbook (give or take in a few different areas). It's just my opinion, but my laptop can do soooo much more. That's a mobile computer.